Addis Ababa had a plan – to expand, and lead newly prosperous Ethiopia into a brave new century. But after protests led to a violent and harrowing state crackdown, what happens next could reverberate across Africa. By Jason Burke Police fire tear gas to disperse protesters during Irreecha, the thanksgiving festival of the Oromo people in Bishoftu town of Oromia region, Ethiopia. Photograph: (c) Tiksa Negeri/Reuters “The police came with officials a few weeks ago. We had a day’s warning,” says Haile, a 19-year-old former resident. “Old people, children, pregnant women … It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, your house was smashed to bits.”s Africa. Drive out of Addis Ababa’s new central business district, with its five-star hotels, banks and gleaming office blocks. Head south, along the traffic-choked avenues lined with new apartment blocks, cafes, cheap hotels and, in the neighbourhood where the European Union has its offices, several excellent restaurants. Go past a vast new church, the cement skeletons of several dozen unfinished housing developments, under a new highway and swing left round the vast construction site from which the new terminal for the Ethiopian capital’s main international airport is rising. Here, the tarmac gives way to cobbles and grit and the city loosens its hold. Goats crop a parched field beside corrugated iron and breezeblock sheds, home to a shifting population of labourers and their families. Children in spotless uniforms neatly avoid fetid open drains as they walk home from school. Long-horned cattle wander. Beyond the airport, the road splits into a series of gravel tracks that quickly become dusty paths across fields, which take you to the village of Weregenu. There is nothing remotely exceptional about Weregenu. It is just another cluster of flimsy homes like many others around, and within, Addis Ababa. Nor is there much exceptional about the series of demolitions here over recent months. As the Ethiopian capital expands, it needs housing, rubbish dumps, space for factories. All land is theoretically owned by the government, merely leased by tenants, and when the government says go, you have to go. So Weregenu’s thousand or so inhabitants know they are living on borrowed time. All have been warned that the bulldozers will come back. “No one told us why they wanted the land, except it is needed for development. We’ve been living there for years and years. I grew up there. Now we have to find somewhere else, or pay rent – and we can’t afford it.” All over the developing world, there are people with similar stories. By 2050, according to the UN, over half of Africa’s population will live in cities, a much lower proportion than elsewhere in the world but twice as high as now. Ethiopia is one of the countries where urbanisation is moving fastest, and like elsewhere the process is placing massive strain on established political, economic and social systems. One result, as elsewhere, is violence. The unrest in Ethiopia started in late 2015 with a small demonstration at a town where locals suspected officials of planning to build on a popular football pitch and a forest reserve. They rapidly intensified, prompting a brutal reaction from security forces. This prompted more protests and, inevitably, more brutality. By early autumn last year, several hundred people were dead and the unrest had become a full-blown political crisis. Accounts of the violence are harrowing. Security forces have shot into crowds of unarmed schoolchildren, students and farmers. Footage of such incidents shows teenagers bleeding on the ground just metres from officials. Police have gone from house to house hunting suspected protesters, combed universities for activists who are then beaten with rifle butts or worse, and picked up any politicians suspected of dissent. Many detainees simply disappear. There is evidence of extra-judicial executions, while prisoners describe being kept for weeks in solitary confinement in dark cells, subjected to successive interrogations and beatings. “I had no idea if it was day or night,” one prisoner, a musician held for weeks in prison in Addis Ababa last year, remembers. “I was interrogated for about two weeks, and punched or slapped. Then they tied my wrists together and hung me up by my arms from a hook. They hit my hands with sticks, breaking the bones. I passed out.” When he regained consciousness, the 31-year-old was treated for his injuries and then held for a further two months in a “big hall, deep underground” where more than 100 detainees lived on water and bread, using a bucket for a toilet. He later fled overseas, where he spoke to the Guardian. Many of the protesters were young, so a high proportion of those killed or injured were teenagers. Security forces targeted those who provided assistance or shelter to suspected activists, too. Parents, friends and schoolmates were detained to pressure fugitive children to turn themselves in. Two teenage athletes who defected while in South Africa for a competition last summer described how friends and relatives had subsequently been roughed up and detained. “They have been rounding them up,” one said. The protests continued throughout last year at a rate of more than one a day. Some factories were burned, a few vehicles torched and occasional stones thrown. The government described the protesters as “armed gangs”. The numbers of dead or injured demonstrators mounted. The final act came in October at Bishoftu, a city 35km from Addis Ababa, during a vast religious festival. When some among the crowd of hundreds of thousands began to raise slogans against the government, security forces moved in, firing tear gas and, some witnesses claim, live ammunition. In the stampede that followed, at least 100 died, according to western officials who watch Ethiopia. Activists claim the number was many times higher. The news prompted a new wave of protests. A state of emergency was declared, followed by mass arrests. Ethiopia had long been held up as one of Africa’s star economic performers and an island of stability in an anarchic region. Though recent months have been calmer, the fallout from the unrest of the last two years may still dramatically change the history of one of the continent’s most important countries – and possibly the future of hundreds of millions of people across the entire continent. The questions posed by the crisis here are vital ones. Does the accelerating expansion of cities – from Algiers to Dar es Salaam, from Cairo to Kinshasa – inevitably mean violence? Will urban development heal existing tensions between communities in fragile nations or aggravate them? Could it be economic success, rather than failure, that brings revolution? ‘We are marginalised in everything’ Gataa, an activist, is slim, small, bespectacled and in his mid-40s. He is inconspicuous, sitting and sipping water in northern Addis Ababa while he talks softly of protest, death, detention and violence. Gataa (not his real name) is an Oromo, the largest single ethnic group within Ethiopia, comprising 35-40% of the population. The Oromo have played the principal role in the recent unrest, suffered the most significant casualties and been arrested in the greatest number. The primary grievance outlined by Gataa is that the Oromo have been oppressed for centuries by other ethnic groups in Ethiopia, first the Amhara, which comprise somewhere between 25-30% of the population, and, more recently, the Tigrayans, only 6%. Many Oromo, and others, say the current government is dominated by the Tigrayans, at least behind the scenes, who are also viewed as benefiting disproportionately from recent economic growth. Both charges are contested by officials and nuanced at least by many analysts and historians. But there is no doubt that there is a powerful Oromo identity and a strong sense of grievance. “We are marginalised in everything,” says Gataa. “All the best jobs, the contracts, the power is with the others. It has always been this way.” In 2014, municipal authorities in the capital had published a new strategic document outlining the future development of the city. In most places, this would be a mundane exercise attracting little attention. But for Gataa, and millions of others, “the Addis Ababa integrated zone master plan” was far from innocuous. Ethiopia is split into nine regions, each one for a different ethnicity, and two cities that run themselves. Addis Ababa is one of these, and is effectively an enclave within Oromia, the state of the Oromos. The state resembles a belt of territory straddling the country with Addis as the buckle. The “integrated zone” covered in the plan included a 1.1m hectare strip of land around the city, outside the current municipal boundaries. A glance at a map shows how the expansion of the Addis Ababa it described would have neatly bisected Oromia. “It is a land grab, an eviction, a new invasion,” says Gataa. “This is Oromo land. Already we have been pushed to the outskirts of the city. Now they push us further so they can build and develop and construct. The farmers have to go. They get jobs on the construction sites on the land where they lived. There is no question of compensation, or any benefit. So what do you expect? Land is everything for the Oromo. It is our culture and identity. It is a matter of life and death.” If discontent and resentment at the government cuts across all ethnic groups, the Oromo had a powerful narrative to frame their grievances – and to mobilise. “This was a rallying cry,” says Gataa. Half a dozen activists in the influential Oromo diaspora – from the US to South Africa – echoed his words. The masterplan of 2014 did not prompt immediate protests however. Officials say this is evidence that unrest was manufactured from overseas, a charge Oromo activists inside and outside Ethiopia deny. Either way, the protests rapidly left the original issue of the masterplan far behind, almost everyone interviewed for this article said. Many recent demonstrations have been in the Amhara region, where there are few Oromo, but similar frustrations. “The masterplan was a trigger but not the cause,” says Gataa. “It seems calm now but under the surface much is happening. We are gathering our forces now. People are talking, meeting, organising. Now no one – not even the young people – is interested in [economic] growth. Once you have lost faith in the government, everything is dark for you. “Am I afraid? Yes, but when those in the front line fall, others will take their place.” That Addis Ababa is in dire need of planning is not in doubt. It was founded in 1886, by the emperor Menelik II, who is widely seen as the architect of modern Ethiopia and whose statue now towers over a busy roundabout in the capital’s scruffy, lively neighbourhood of Arada. In the 1930s, just before Italy’s short-lived occupation of Ethiopia, the British writer Evelyn Waugh described the city as being “in a rudimentary state of construction” with “half-finished buildings at every corner”. Just over 30 years later, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinsk told his readers of “the wooden scaffoldings scattered” about a city that resembled “a large village of a few hundred thousand, situated on hills amid eucalyptus groves”. The hills are still there, as is the wooden scaffolding, which is more practical in the heat and sun than its steel counterpart. The trees are gone. The growth of Addis Ababa has been extraordinary. In 1974, when Haile Selassie was deposed in a military coup after 58 years as emperor and regent, its population was estimated to be half a million at most. By 1991, when the brutal “Derg” regime was finally ousted by rebel groups, there may have been double that number, living at around 2,300m in a dusty bowl below the Entoto hills. Today there are somewhere between 3.4 and five million people living in Addis Ababa. Most are without proper sanitation or clean water, many lack steady electricity, there is limited public transport and rubbish collection is grossly inadequate. The World Bank expects the city’s population to double over the next 10 to 15 years. “This certainly raises some major challenges, as it would for any city,” says a UN official who has worked on urban issues in the city. Some forecast a population of 35 million by the end of the century. So one would imagine that any effort to put in place a strategic plan to manage that expansion would have been welcomed. ‘A climate of fear’ Aster lost her house in the demolitions of Werengenu village. She is now living, along with her HIV positive mother and her teenage daughter, on the floor of a neighbour’s two-roomed home. “What do you think we feel? I had a legal lease to this land,” she says, standing in the rubble of her home. “I built my house here long ago. I have friends, neighbours, relatives here. It’s a community. Where do I go know? These officials, they do not care about ordinary people. The government just work for themselves.” When anyone is prepared to talk, and has checked over their shoulder to see who is listening, this a common charge in Addis Ababa, and partially explains the violence prompted by the 2014 planning document. Meles Zenawi, who ruled Ethiopia from 1991 until his death in 2012, frequently said he did not believe democracy and development were linked. He pursued a political and economic model that was closer that of China the west. Along with Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, Ethiopia is often cited as the example of how a repressive and centralised government can solve economic challenges in Africa as well as, if not better than, more open but messier democratic systems. Critics argue that such development, if real, is unsustainable in the long run. Ethiopian officials deny the accusation of authoritarianism. They point out that President Obama described Ethiopia’s government as “democratically elected” on a state visit in 2015, and that the country holds regular elections. Both are true. However Obama qualified his praise and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has won every major poll for more than 20 years and currently occupies every seat in the 537-strong parliament. Diplomats in Addis Ababa describe “a climate of fear” and point out that “almost all opposition politicians are in prison or abroad”. Ethiopia is ranked 140th out of 180 countries by press freedom campaigners. Bloggers are a particular target, with many held under anti-terrorism laws. But the authoritarian development model depends on a sufficient number of citizens accepting reduced freedoms in return for a slice of the growing wealth that an efficient, competent and impartial administration delivers. A minority can be repressed, but you can’t fool everyone all the time. And increasingly in Ethiopia, despite the massive growth over recent decades, the government is seen as inefficient, corrupt and unresponsive. The combination would be a devastating one for governments anywhere. In Ethiopia, it threatens the fundamentals on which the state has been based for decades. “People will pay a bribe, reluctantly, if that’s what it takes to get services,” says one analyst in Addis Ababa. “They don’t like it but they will do it. But when they have to pay a bribe and still get treated badly, then that’s when they get angry.” Then there is the inequality. According to the World Bank, the GDP of Ethiopia is $62bn, almost eight times more than in 2001. Tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty, primary school enrolment is approaching 100%, and if there are still millions who depend on aid to eat and an annual threat of hunger in many rural areas, it is almost impossible to envisage the appalling famines of 30 years ago recurring. But the new wealth generated over recent decades is not being evenly distributed. In 2014 Ethiopia topped a list of African countries creating the most millionaires. “Sales are good, especially of imported champagne,” says the manager of a fine wine shop in an upscale neighbourhood in the south of Addis Ababa. Next door, a dozen luxury cars fill a dealer’s yard. The best-selling vehicle is the Toyota Prado, a vast SUV which costs $200,000. The owner says he sells between five and seven each week. At the same time, poverty levels, even in the capital, remain between 25-30%. “Once there was nothing here – and people argued then,” says one leading businessman over a $10 sandwich in the Sheraton hotel. “So imagine what it is like now there is a great big pie, and everyone wants a slice.” Three further elements are fuelling discontent across Ethiopia, the businessman said: the very large number of graduates in the country, a consequence of the vast expansion of the education system since 1991; social media, which has raised expectations among young people in the country to “stratospheric levels”; and ethnicity. Officials know the problems that face the EPRDF as it completes 25 years in power. The Addis Ababa integrated development plan has been withdrawn, with any new planning based on the city remaining within its current administrative limits. There are frequent official statements expressing concern about corruption. The media – which is largely owned or controlled by the state – is full of stories reporting the huge social programmes, the aid effectively spent, the effort to build a million new homes in Addis Ababa, the billion-dollar coffee crop, and the vast new dams. Some criticism is also tolerated, though only where it poses no threat to the ruling party – in English-language academic journals published by thinktanks closely linked to the ruling party, for example, or English-language news websites with small readership. At the same time, anyone or anything that is considered a threat is targeted by the full force of the state. “Ethiopia is facing political, social and economic challenges. The new generation want to be informed and are not patient,” admits Negeri Lencho, the newly appointed minister of communications. Lencho described last year’s state of emergency as justified and temporary, pointing out that Turkey and France have introduced similar measures in the last 18 months. “When the government faces a group of people who are killing and destroying property, when there is no law and order, then that government has to do something,” he says. “But it is not a big deal. It is gradually coming to a usual situation.” As for the crackdown on the media, this too is not the fault of the government. The problem, according to Lencho, is that Ethiopian journalists are not “professional” and that is partly why so many of them end up in jail. “Ethiopia has its own system of government based on a system where media and journalists should give priority to the needs of the people,” the minister says. “The role of Ethiopian journalists comes from the real and actual needs of the Ethiopian people today. Those in prison have not respected fundamental journalistic ethics.”. Such views are anathema to activists such as Gataa. Like many others, he calls for international intervention, or at least more vocal criticism of Ethiopia from other governments. So too do human rights campaigners overseas. Yet, as analysts agree, this is unlikely as long as the US sees Ethiopia as a key regional ally. Diplomats in Addis Ababa talk of how advancing human rights will help stability in security in east Africa but the truth is that countering the increasing influence of China in Ethiopia, and fears over rising Islamic militancy in the region, make any significant pressure unlikely. The EU now see Ethiopia as a key actor in the struggle to slow migrant flows across the Mediterranean. There is little appetite in the chancelleries of Europe or Washington to risk chaos in a country of nearly 100 million in such a sensitive part of the world for the sake of a few thousand incarcerated activists and commentators. “We want to heal Ethiopian democracy and make it vibrant,” Lencho says. Few major powers are likely to challenge the statement in the near future. Revolution or evolution? Analysts in Addis Ababa agree only on two things: they do not want to be quoted by name for fear of attracting the attention of the security services, and that it is very difficult to predict what happens next in Ethiopia. Some believe the government has won. They say that the promise of reforms, a cabinet reshuffle, the withdrawal of the masterplan, a degree of “protest fatigue”, the repression and the ongoing economic growth together mean that no further unrest can be expected until the next elections, scheduled for 2020 at the earliest. Analysts point out that the political leadership retains the loyalty of the powerful intelligence services, army and federal police and even if there are many malcontents, there are also millions of people, ranging from petty officials and police officers to major business owners, who see their future welfare as dependent on the continued rule of the EPRDF. They point out that recent festival of Epiphany, which some thought might be a flashpoint for further protests in this predominantly Christian and devout country, went off without a problem and say that Ethiopia is not as fragile as some believe. If these analysts are right, Ethiopia’s course over the coming years will encourage supporters of an authoritarian model of development across Africa and beyond. Others, however, take an opposite view. They say the unrest has challenged the basic premises that underpin the legitimacy of the government in the country. If Ethiopians can no longer look forward to a steady evolution towards political pluralism and ethnic inclusion, coupled with a degree of material improvement, then the fundamental contract between the government and the population will break down. In this case, if there is no significant reform and particularly if there is no outlet for resentment through protest, an open media, unions or opposition parties, then the centre cannot hold for very long. As they doubt whether there exists leadership and intellectual capacity to execute the necessary changes, massive and disruptive change is inevitable. This view will encourage those who believe democracy is a prerequisite of sustainable development – though all but the most dogmatic will be concerned over the trauma such change implies. The most likely scenario, as so often is the case, is that some kind of middle way will be found. All over Africa there is tension and friction, sometimes violence, along fracture lines that have little to do with formal frontiers between states. The “Africa rising” narrative does not fit this messy reality – but nor does its pessimistic opposite. Addis Ababa, like Ethiopia as a whole, has always charted its own path, confounding predictions and confusing pundits. This is unlikely to change now. There will doubtlessly be further waves of unrest, and detentions, repression and deaths. There will be some minor concessions from the authorities. Economic growth may slow. But it does not feel like the revolution is just around the corner. On a Sunday, the priests’ chanting sounds out across Addis Ababa at 6am over crackling loudspeakers and the faithful file into the churches. Children join less edifying activities: street football, for the most part. By mid-morning the tourists, who never really went away despite the travel warnings (now mostly lifted), are queuing inside the national museum for a glance at the remains of Lucy, one of the earliest hominids, and middle-class families are taking selfies in its garden. Work crews in straw sun hats sweep the steps of the obelisk in Yekatit 12 square, which commemorates those who died resisting Italy’s occupation from 1936-1941. Through the afternoon, on Churchill Street, boys sell mangoes, cheap watches, cigarettes and gums to a continuous rush of old men in crumpled suits, young women in tight dresses and older women in traditional white shawls. The packed minibuses that serve as taxis jostle and manoeuvre, watched by bored police officers. As dusk turns to night, the fashionable lounge venues in the developed downtown neighbourhood of Bole fill with “re-pats”, who have returned from London, New York or Dubai, and there’s not a free table in the bars and restaurants of Arada, where men cluster around grilled meat and couples share bottles of beer, shouting to be heard over the music. By early evening, these bars’ multi-coloured strings of bulbs are the only ones shining in the gathering gloom. By midnight the music stops, the lights are turned off, and the remaining revellers make their way home. (c) The Guardian 2017

By Inam Ahmed and Shakhawat Liton At the end of his ruthless massacre and war against an unarmed people, General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi who led the Pakistan army in the killings, described the genocide of Bangalis in his book “Betrayal of East Pakistan” as “a display of stark cruelty more merciless than the massacres at Bukhara and Baghdad by Chengis Khan and Halaku khan or Jallianwala Bagh by the British General Dyer.” The world hardly paid heed to the ruthless killings going on in Bangladesh in those long nine months. The tales of the macabre were told and retold by countless many here. And yet, the world did not have time to listen. Forty-six years after the bloodbath that hardly left any family untouched, Bangladesh has finally taken initiatives to get recognition of the Pakistan army led genocide by the UN. Ahead of Bangladesh observing March 25, the day when the Pakistan army unleashed its war machine against a sleeping population, as Genocide Day, the government will send two senior officials to the UN headquarters in New York and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) headquarters in Geneva. They will talk to senior UN officials to start the process of getting UN recognition of the Pakistani atrocity. “This is a tall task, needing support from many,” Shahriar Alam, state minister for foreign affairs, told The Daily Star yesterday. “We will approach those countries like Russia, India and the UK which had supported our cause in 1971 so that these countries pass resolutions in their own parliaments to recognize the killings in Bangladesh as genocide.” Shahriar said the foreign ministry has also set up a desk with two secretaries which will monitor the task. The UN has recognized two massacres as genocide – the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide. Although the world leaders did not pay heed to the grisly murders in this part of the world, often considered as a backwater in the then geopolitical map dominated by the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan, India and Indo-China, concerns were raised by the world press at the time. The New York Times in a piece in May of 1971 called the killing "one of the bloodiest slaughters of modern times." In April that year, New York Times, in an editorial headlined "Bloodbath in Bengal," condemned Washington's silence on what it called the "indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and the selective elimination of leadership groups in East Bengal." The Sunday Times published articles and editorials under headlines of "Genocide." The US Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent a telegram to Washington headed with the phrase "Selective Genocide." The recently published book by Prof Gary Bass, based primarily on the declassified White House tapes, has been named as Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide." The then UN Secretary General, U Thant, on June 3, 1971, wrote to the President of the Security Council saying "The happenings in East Pakistan constitute one of the most tragic episodes in human history. Of course, it is for future historians to gather facts and make their own evaluations, but it has been a very terrible blot on a page of human history." But world leaders would not pay much attention to these pleas in the then complicated geo-politics. The onus of having it recognised internationally as genocide and for the dead to be recognised as victims of genocide fell on Bangladesh. The cabinet yesterday at a meeting with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina approved March 25 to be observed as Genocide Day, clearing all formalities to recognise the brutal genocide committed on this day in 1971. On March 11, the Jatiya Sangsad passed a resolution to observe the day as Genocide Day. From now on, the Government of Bangladesh will observe March 25 as Genocide Day. “The foreign ministry has started efforts to have the day recognised internationally,” Cabinet Secretary M Shafiul Alam said in a press briefing after the meeting. What significance will UN recognition have? First, it will officially document the atrocities of war against this population by a brutal regime. For humanity to move forward, it has strong significance. A crime has been committed and that has to be recognised as a crime. Otherwise, humanity will see recurrence of genocides. It is also a process of shaming the perpetrators. Secondly, if Bangladesh takes forward charges against the Pakistani leaders and soldiers for war crimes in international courts, this recognition will help it happen as such recognition has been in the case of the Bosnian genocide. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Daily Star

By Jamiles Lartey Police investigators said James Jackson admitted to killing Timothy Caughman, 66. Photograph: Jefferson Siegel/AP A white military veteran accused of a hate crime for the stabbing death of a black man in New York regarded the attack as “practice” for a larger assault he hoped to carry out in Times Square, court documents claim. James Jackson, 26, was arrested hours after allegedly stabbing Timothy Caughman to death in Manhattan on Wednesday. According to prosecutors, Jackson, a Maryland resident, traveled to New York for his attack with the intention of killing “as many black men as possible”. “Mr Jackson regarded the killing as practice prior to going to Times Square to kill additional black men,” according to court documents obtained by the New York Daily News. Police investigators said Jackson admitted to the murder during questioning. Prosecutors said Jackson plunged a 2ft sword into the chest of Caughman, a self-described “can and bottle recycler”, as Caughman bent over a trash bin near his home. The 66-year-old, whose social media accounts are full of pictures with celebrities such as Beyoncé and Oprah, managed to stagger into a nearby police station, from which he was transported to a hospital and later died. “The defendant was motivated purely by hatred,” said the assistant district attorney Joan Illuzzi, who added that the charges could be upgraded, “as this was an act most likely of terrorism”. Prosecutors said Jackson hated black men, especially those who dated white women. According to investigators, Jackson, a decorated veteran of the Afghanistan war, had harbored his beliefs for at least a decade – at one point having been recorded on tape stalking black men. Dr Scott Krugman, chairman of pediatrics at Franklin Square medical center in Baltimore and a friend of the Jackson family, said the allegations were out of character with his family’s beliefs and the way he was raised. Jackson’s parents, David and Patricia Jackson, are active members of Towson Presbyterian church and have two other sons. Patricia Jackson is a former teacher of English-language students in the Baltimore County school system and worked for Well for the Journey, a Christian not-for-profit organization that helps people “integrate spirituality into their daily lives in a safe, inclusive space”. “They’re liberal as liberal can be,” Krugman said. “We were at a dinner party with them and everybody was complaining about the current administration and very open about rights for everybody and making sure we’re not excluding immigrants, everything like that. I’m just beyond shocked right now.” In a statement, the Jackson family extended condolences to Caughman’s family and said it was “shocked, horrified and heartbroken by this tragedy”. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

By Jeffrey Gettleman Duop soon after being reunited with his family. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times BENTIU, South Sudan — The teenage boy walked off the plane with two small rocks jammed into his ears. His head still hurt from the beatings, and loud noises bothered him, but he didn’t want any earplugs, just those two little rocks. He had no bags. His pants were dirty. He was the size of a man but with the confusion of a child in his eyes. He had been drafted into a militia, captured by government soldiers, punched, kicked, whipped and stomped. And now, after six long years, he was going home. Stepping into a Unicef truck and sliding across the long bench-like seats in the back, he looked terrified. “Duop, can you hear me?” a Unicef worker asked, using the boy’s first name. “You’re going to see your mom.” Duop stared out the window, and as the truck rumbled along a hard, jutted road, nobody else said a word. South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to, especially for its children. This nation was birthed in ahalo of jubilation in 2011 but soon cracked open into brutal, ethnically driven warfare that has burned down schools, ripped apart families, put thousands of children under arms and disfigured, maimed and killed countless others. Now the country is being stalked by famine, and famines tend to pick off the youngest. During Somalia’s famine in 2011, more than half of the quarter-million people who died were children under 5. As Herodotus wrote more than two millenniums ago: In peaceful times, children inter their parents. In war times, parents inter their children. For South Sudan, it doesn’t look as if the war times are going to end anytime soon. And even if they do, there will be permanent damage. Duop is around 16. He has big hands, thin wrists, a shaved head and an oval face with a rounded chin. He is from the Nuer ethnic group and a village in the country’s north, near the town of Bentiu, where the savanna is relatively flat and the thorn bushes and scratchy elephant grass stretch to the horizon. The heat here has an almost physical presence. By 9 a.m., it’s triple digits. By noon, 110. The sunlight is blinding and unsparing, heavy and bewildering. During the hot hours of the day people hide under trees. Duop was a child soldier, among the 10,000-plus toting rifles in South Sudan. Unicef officials say both the rebels and the government military, which has been trained by the United States, use child soldiers, some as young as 10, and under international law using children that young is a war crime. One reason Duop’s last name is not being included in this article is because Unicef officials said he witnessed many war crimes. The soldiers he saw committing these atrocities could easily hunt him down. The full extent of what Duop experienced — and suffered — is a bit of a mystery. His family said that government soldiers punched him in the head repeatedly and kicked him in the face. He seems to have lost much of his hearing and the ability to talk. He may also be hearing voices, said some of the aid workers struggling to bring him out of his shell. This could be another reason for the rocks in Duop’s ears. He may be trying to keep the voices out. Sometimes, when he’s sitting alone, he suddenly laughs. Or scowls. From numerous accounts pieced together from family members, it seems that Duop quit school around the age of 9, left home, joined a rebel militia, then joined the government army, defected, became a rebel again, was captured, beaten and tortured by government soldiers and then discarded. All this by his 17th birthday, though no one knows precisely when that will be. Unicef’s office in South Sudan has a database of thousands of children separated from their parents, and in Duop’s case, he got lucky, considering all that he had been through. In December, an older man found him badly wounded and wandering around an army base outside Juba, South Sudan’s capital. The older man bundled him up and took him to a large displaced persons camp, where Unicef began trying to figure out who he was. “He did not speak for weeks,” said James Elder, a Unicef spokesman. “I remember after several days he would acknowledge a smile, or, at the sight of a gun, a grimace.” Duop’s mother hadn’t seen him in six years. Through repeated visits to her village, Unicef tracked her down and brought her to a displaced persons camp in Bentiu, the only safe place for them to reunite. When Duop stepped out of the truck, tears burst out of his mother’s eyes. But Nuer culture said she couldn’t touch him, not until he was cleansed. So it was time to make a sacrifice. An aunt scampered away, disappearing into the bowels of the camp, saying something about a goat. The Bentiu camp, like all such camps, is highly concentrated misery. Picture a one-story city of 120,000 souls, row after row after row of dust-blown shacks arranged in a grid of long gravel roads and right angles, something irredeemably hopeless in the perfect geometry that seems to go on for miles and miles. “I feel trapped,” said Gatkuoth Wuor, a teacher living here. No, he shook his head and corrected himself. “I am trapped.” People stay here for two reasons. They are afraid of getting killed accidentally in a crossfire between the government and the rebels, who constantly skirmish right outside Bentiu. Or they are afraid of getting killed intentionally by government forces. Just about everyone in Bentiu’s camp is Nuer, and South Sudan’s government, especially the military, is dominated by members of the Dinka tribe. It was a Nuer-Dinka power struggle that started the war in 2013, two years after South Sudan became independent from Sudan, and a good part of Bentiu was burned down. Recently, the fighting has sucked in many other ethnic groups, engulfing new areas of the country and calling into question South Sudan’s very integrity. A small white goat was eventually procured. Its throat was slit, blood splashing on the ground. Duop’s relatives tried to seem purely joyous. Some sang and some danced. But others whispered to each other: How much do you think he really understands? Would he ever be able to work? Are there any doctors who can help him? (The camp has a small hospital. But Unicef officials said there was nowhere in South Sudan that had the specialists Duop needed.) Duop retreated to a cot in his aunt’s shack. He sat in the dusty gloom. One by one, his relatives appeared in front of him. Several said that after he had left home years ago, they thought he would never return. They rubbed the muscles in his arms, they felt his ears, they stared into his face. A group of women stood a few feet away and ululated, and there couldn’t have been a greater contrast between the animated, passionate voices and the flat, lost look in Duop’s eyes. In a way, the relatives said, it was as if he had come back from the dead. “But he’s not the same,” his aunt said. “He’s deformed.” _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Jason Burke The news spreads fast during the day. The raiders are coming. Two columns of fighters, each thousands strong, armed with assault rifles. “We will fight them. We will take our guns and defend ourselves,” says Simon Logocho, a stall holder in a scruffy market in Pibor, a remote town in eastern South Sudan. Previous attacks – launched in a never-ending cycle of raid and counter-raid by rival tribes – have left hundreds dead and caused widespread destruction. The smaller town of Likuangole, about 30 miles away, was badly damaged earlier this year, while outlying villages were obliterated. The raiders are still some days’ march away and there is hope they may decide Pibor is too large and too poor to be an attractive target. There is not much to loot in the town, a few hundred huts made of plastic and wood scattered between a river crossing and a dirt airstrip. There are almost no cattle any more, and only one trader retains a few sacks of rice. Even the poorly armed, ill-disciplined soldiers – sent from Juba, the capital, to keep order and fend off the rebels – are hungry. Parents send their children to forage for wild fruit, berries and leaves, not to lessons. “There is no food. Everyone is hungry. We have nothing left,” said Nadia Mayigu, a 32-year-old primary school teacher. In a Unicef-supported feeding centre, 12-month-old Peter Ajus is weighed. His mother has walked for four days to bring him in. Photograph: Jason Burke for the Guardian But the raiders are hungry too. Last week the UN said South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011, was facing its “highest ever level of food insecurity”. About 7.5 million people, almost two-thirds of the population, are in need of humanitarian assistance. In some areas half the population are malnourished. An appeal by the UN for more money has faltered, with less than half of the $1.64bn (£1.2bn) budget requested for 2017 so far funded. As elsewhere in Africa where mass starvation threatens, the crisis in South Sudan has been caused by war, not climatic catastrophe. The country has substantial revenues from oil and swaths of fertile agricultural land. But corruption and mismanagement have led to economic collapse, while widespread violence means empty fields, looted seed stocks, displaced farmers and disrupted transport. Pibor, which depends on the road to Juba for all supplies, has been cut off for months. The crisis in the town has established a hierarchy of hunger. Few have sufficient resources to be able to eat well, but some can still buy bags of rice at hugely inflated prices. “Business is OK. There are still some who can pay,” says Ibrahim Adam, a trader from neighbouring Sudan who runs the single stall in the market with a significant stock of food. Yards away, Juma Gocho, 25, who invested in a jerrycan of cooking oil and a sack of salt a month ago, sells tiny quantities of each. For weeks this has earned him enough to buy a glass of flour each day, which he shares among his family. “It stops us getting too hungry, just enough to sleep. But if the road doesn’t open soon, my children will die,” Gocho says. Though the rains have come, turning Pibor’s all-pervading dust to glutinous mud, it will be weeks before even those who have tiny plots of land can harvest crops of maize or sorghum. Anna Koren, a destitute farmer from Pibor, stands amid crops with her children. They have no food and the crops won’t be edible for several weeks. Photograph: Jason Burke for the Guardian The violence in South Sudan is complex. Some fighting pits government forces loyal to Salva Kiir, the president since independence, against a rough coalition of opposition groups. Some is motivated by hatred and competition between major ethnic groups such as the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk and, around Pibor, the Murle tribes. Some is the consequence of local power grabs as much of the country slips into outright anarchy. Some is simply over cattle, or food. But all is accompanied by widespread atrocities committed against civilians, including the abduction of children, massacres and gang rapes. Aid workers have also been targeted: six were killed on the road between Pibor and Juba last month. South Sudan’s leaders have been accused of “deliberate starvation tactics”. The UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, which costs $1bn s year, has been repeatedly criticised for failing to stop such crimes. Since a peace deal between the president and his main rival Riek Machar collapsed last year, the mission’s 12,000 troops have been told to patrol more aggressively and are being reinforced by regional forces. A detachment of British military engineers has also arrived – one of the biggest peacekeeping deployments by the UK for decades. But this effort has not halted the flow of desperate people seeking safety on islands, in swamps, in the UN’s overcrowded “civilian protection camps”, or in neighbouring countries. Nor does it reassure the people of Pibor, who are far from certain the 200 Indian troops stationed there will protect them. “I think they will stay on their base if the raiders come,” said Benjamin Korem, 21, an unemployed administrator. The UN does distribute vast amounts of international food aid, largely through a hugely expensive airlift operation. During the rainy season even the few existing roads are impassable troughs of mud. Though one of the biggest aid efforts in the world, it is still inadequate, reaching only half of those in need. Near the bottom of the hierarchy of hunger in Pibor, and scores of places like it around the country, are people like Mary Kadai, 33. The soldier’s wife depends on handouts from neighbours and relatives who themselves have almost nothing to give. “I had some things, some goats, clothes, but everything is gone,” Kadai says. But even she is better placed than those in isolated outlying villages or those displaced by the ongoing fighting. In the single feeding centre established in Pibor, supported by Unicef and run by a local NGO, dozens of women arrive each morning carrying their children. In February, the centre registered 38 children who were severely malnourished. Last month the total was 256. “It’s because of the conflict. Their cattle are killed; sometimes their husbands or brothers. They have to move and leave everything. They sleep under trees. They eat grass,” said Harrison Jowang, the centre manager. “They tell me of those who have died. There are many of them. The children often die on their way here, because people come so late … They tell me about those who are dying, out in the villages. There are many of them too.” The full toll exacted by either fighting or the malnutrition it causes in South Sudan is unclear. So much of the country is without road or telephonic communication that news of massacres, raids, outbreaks of disease and even the deaths of hundreds of starving children takes weeks, even months, to reach the capitals and international agencies. A rough count of those killed by an intensifying outbreak of cholera – 250 in the past year – is thought to be a gross underestimate. “The truth is that no one is counting the dead,” said a veteran European aid worker in Juba. One who has not been counted is the three-year-old daughter of Mary Cholil, 31, who died a month ago as her mother wandered in search of food and shelter near her burned out village, a five-day walk from Pibor. “All our family is scattered because of the fighting. I learned about the centre too late for my smallest one. I buried her under a bush,” she says. There is little chance of any immediate improvement for South Sudan. The international community is distracted by events elsewhere. Regional powers show little commitment to resolving the shattered country’s problems. Outside Pibor’s battered primary school a group of schoolgirls gather as goats are handed over by an aid agency to the families of former child soldiers. The students form a line and dance slowly and carefully. “There is no more rejoicing in our country. There is no more moving together in our country. But in the name of Jesus, we hope for ever,” they sing. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Guardian

By Ivor Prickett An Iraqi federal police officer in the Old City of west Mosul. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times Days after the Iraqi government officially declared victory over the Islamic State in Mosul in July, the fighting was far from over. Roughly the size of a block in Manhattan, the last ISIS holdout of the Old City did not seem like the kind of place where anyone could still be alive after weeks of brutal combat. But a few such areas kept up the fight for days. And — horribly, amazingly — civilians were still being pulled out. What we saw as we went step by step with the Iraqi forces here made their survival seem even more miraculous. At a forward base near the front line, Iraqi special forces soldiers brought in a man who had crossed the front line, holding a young boy no more than 2. Iraqi special forces soldiers washed and dressed a small boy who had been carried out of an area under ISIS control by a man suspected of being a fleeing militant.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times Wearing just a bloodied vest and a dirty pair of shorts with no shoes, the man did not even know who the child was. He was immediately suspected of being an ISIS fighter who had merely used the boy as a human shield. The troops took the man away, and the commander in charge held the boy on his lap. Doubting that the boy’s parents could still be alive, he decided that one of his men — he knew that the soldier and his wife had been unable to have children of their own — should adopt the boy. Here on the battlefield, some of the men washed the child and his tattered clothing before the officer arrived to meet his new son. As Iraqi forces took control of the Old City and searched the area, they seized several of the Islamic State’s undetonated car bombs, the heavily armored improvisations that became the most feared weapons in the militants’ arsenal. Soldiers drove one of the captured vehicles back to their base, sandwiched in a military convoy through west Mosul. The few civilians who had come back to the area stopped in disbelief to watch the vehicle lumber by, still able to evoke shock even in safer hands. Soldiers driving a captured car bomb, made by the Islamic State, through Mosul back to their base. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times A squad of special forces soldiers near the front line of continued clashes in the Old City began to shout that they had found an injured militant in the basement of a shattered building. A few of the men hauled the emaciated fighter out of the basement into the street. He was barely alive, injured during a battle several days before. He said that his name was Malik, and that he was a 36-year-old resident of Mosul. He was so weak it was hard to imagine him being a capable fighter at any point recently. The commander ordered him to be taken to a doctor, and the men carried him away across the mounds of rubble and around the corner, out of sight. Soldiers carrying away an injured militant who was found in the basement of a destroyed building in the Old City. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times While searching one building’s courtyard, soldiers came across the bodies of up to 10 men, dead for probably more than a week. It was impossible to verify what had happened or even who they were, although the soldiers immediately proclaimed that they had been members of the Islamic State. At least two of the bodies appeared to have their hands tied behind their backs. Whether they were captives of the Islamic State who died in a shootout or ISIS prisoners who were summarily executed it was impossible to say. But this last stage of the battle, often taking place under a media blackout, has been punctuated by rumors of extrajudicial killings by the security forces. The bodies of suspected Islamic State fighters who were killed in the Old City. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times After days of continued fighting, the sounds of gunfire and warplanes finally stilled over the Old City. The last trickles of survivors seemed to end. The sand-colored skeletons of the homes here had become a graveyard for the last few ISIS fighters, and for anyone else trapped along with them. But the homes all still had to be searched. The Iraqi special forces began picking through mounds of pulverized rubble, sometimes two stories high, in the Islamic State’s last bastion. Mosul’s Maydan district, where the last militants were corralled by Iraqi security forces. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times A special forces sniper and his spotter continued to search for targets from a balcony overlooking the Tigris River, but were coming up empty. The unit’s lieutenant said the sniper had killed 85 militants in the preceding two weeks, many of them as they tried to flee the area by crossing the river from west to east. The remains of some still dotted the riverbanks, but the pervasive stench of rot was a surer indication of what had happened here. An Iraqi soldier peering out from a sniper’s position on a bank of the Tigris River. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times Among the survivors who got out before the battle’s final chapter, at the beginning of July, was a 30-year-old woman named Shayma, along with her children and her mother. They were staying at a camp for displaced people in Hamam al-Alil, a town just south of Mosul. She had been married to an ISIS fighter. He had joined soon after the militants took control of Mosul and its surroundings in 2014. They needed the money, she said, for the house they were building in the town of Qaiyara. As Iraqi forces began closing in on Mosul last year, the militants forcibly moved Shayma’s family, and those of other fighters, into western Mosul. She said her husband had been killed in an airstrike nearby during the fighting in March. Now a widow, and tarnished for having married a known member of the Islamic State, she despaired of finding a way to care for her children and mother. Shayma, the wife of an ISIS fighter who was killed, with her children at a displaced persons camp south of Mosul. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times The operation to clear the Old City of explosives and search for anyone still hiding is continuing. The men doing the job are moving slowly through the narrow back streets, checking every house and basement for ISIS holdouts, though the odds of finding any alive dwindle by the day. Iraqi soldiers searching houses for explosives and any militants still hiding in the Old City. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times On the outskirts of the city, thousands of men accused of having joined or helped the Islamic State await their fates in sweltering and cramped jails. They stared out at me as we walked the halls. Suspected members of the Islamic State in a jail south of Mosul. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times Earlier, I had met other survivors from the Old City. While the fighting was still going on in mid-July, I encountered about 20 women and children sitting in a destroyed shop in the Maydan district, just a few hundred yards from the remaining battlefield. They were covered in dust, and many had been injured. Just that morning they had fled while under fire from Islamic State snipers. The Iraqi soldiers said three from the group had been killed. Most were obviously traumatized. They sat silently, drinking the water and eating the food the soldiers brought to them. Some of the children in the group had lost their parents and had come out with other families. A traumatized group of women and children, some accused of belonging to the families of ISIS members, waited to be taken to a displaced persons camp.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times One woman said she had been married to four different ISIS fighters, and the colonel who commanded the counterterrorism units in the area was questioning her about one of them. She had been carrying a knife, a tablet computer and nearly $2,000 in American money. The group was eventually taken away to be questioned further. When asked where the women and children would be taken, the soldiers merely said to a camp. Women and children being transported to a displaced persons camp. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times The toll of the battle for Mosul on nearly every front — human rights, lives, property and Iraqi heritage — is only now starting to come into focus. As the last searches in the Old City wrap up, the almost unfathomable task of rebuilding the city and, somehow, coming to grips with all that happened here, stretches out ahead into the unknown. For this group, though, that may well be the special “rehabilitation camp” for the families of ISIS members that was detailed in a Human Rights Watch report. The rights group said the families’ detention there amounted to collective punishment, and was a violation of human rights. Iraqi special forces soldiers searched through the rubble in the Old City. CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________(c) 2017 The New York Times

By Jacqueline Williams The Australian police described on Friday an elaborate terrorist plot in which two men from Sydney tried to place an explosive supplied by the Islamic State on a flight last month, an operation that officials said was among “the most sophisticated plots that has ever been attempted on Australian soil.” The two men, who have been charged with planning a terrorist act, were scheduled to appear in court via video link on Friday, and they were refused bail. The Australian Federal Police said the charges covered an aborted attempt last month to place an explosive on an Etihad Airways flight from Sydney. The discovery of the plot led the authorities to tighten airport security around the nation last weekend. As part of the plot, one of the men brought the explosive device to the Sydney airport in a piece of luggage, and asked his brother to take the luggage on the plane without disclosing its actual contents. But the bag never made it onto the flight for unknown reasons. Officials said the discovery of the plot was the 13th significant threat that the police had exposed and broken up since Australia raised its terrorist threat level to probable in 2014. “The threat from terrorism is real,” Michael Phelan, the deputy commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, said at a news conference on Friday announcing the charges against the two men, Khaled Mahmoud Khayat, 49, and Mahmoud Khayat, 32. “This is one of the most sophisticated plots that has ever been attempted on Australian soil.” Investigators say that parts of the explosive, a roadside bomb, were sent through international air cargo from Turkey through Islamic State operatives in Syria to one of the suspects in Australia, Commissioner Phelan said. He added that an Islamic State commander told one of the suspects how to assemble the explosive device into “what we believe was a functioning I.E.D. to be placed on that flight.” But the bag never got past the check-in counter.\ Michael Phelan, the deputy commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, said at a news conference on Friday that an Islamic State commander guided a suspect in assembling what investigators believe was an improvised explosive device. CreditPeter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “As a result of that aborted attempt, there were a number of actions that took place on that day, and we did recover components of that I.E.D.,” the commissioner said. Investigators also said that after the airport plot did not succeed, the suspects tried to create an improvised chemical device intended to release “highly toxic hydrogen sulfide.” An Islamic State operative in Syria advised the men on which public areas to place the device, the police said. “There were certainly precursor chemicals that had been produced,” Commissioner Phelan said. “But they were a long way from having a chemical dispersion device.” Officials initially offered few details about the investigation after tightening airport securityin response to news of the plot. But at a news conference in Sydney on Friday, they asserted that investigators had “completely disrupted this plot.” The counterterrorism investigation started last week, after the local authorities received intelligence that someone in Australia was planning an attack against what officials described as “Australian aviation targets.” Investigators said that person in Australia had been receiving directions from a member of the Islamic State in Syria. The two were introduced by a brother of one of the two men charged on Friday. The brother was a senior member of the Islamic State in Syria, officials said. The police said that the explosive device meant for the plane never passed through airport security. After the plot was uncovered, the police and intelligence officials carried out raids over the weekend, executing six search warrants throughout Sydney and arresting four people suspected of having connections to the plot. One person was released from custody this week without charges and another is still in custody. In Perth on Friday, the justice minister, Michael Keenan, said that had the plot been carried out, it “could have been catastrophic.” “Australians will feel very unnerved about hearing this news,” he said. But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said law enforcement’s success in disrupting the terrorist plot was a reminder of “why we are relentless in our determination to keep Australians safe.” The charges against the men carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York times

By Jeffrey Gettleman Rajuma this month at the refugee camp in Bangladesh, to which she escaped in late August.CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times As I walked out of the refugee camp, my phone rang. The instant I said hello, my wife could hear it in my voice. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “I just finished the worst interview of my life,” I said. I was standing near the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh, where half a million Rohingya people, probably one of the most unwanted ethnic groups on the planet, fled after government massacres in Myanmar. I had just said goodbye to a young woman named Rajuma and watched her — a frail figure in a red veil — disappear into a crowd with one of the most horrible stories I had ever heard. I’ve covered genocide in Sudan and children being blown apart in Iraq. I’ve been dispatched to earthquakes, hurricanes, civil wars, international wars, insurgencies and famines. As foreign correspondents, this is what we do, rush into the world’s biggest disasters. In 20 years of doing this, I’ve become a specialist in despair. But Rajuma’s story stopped me. She told me (and everything she said was consistent with dozens of other witness accounts) that Myanmar government soldiers stormed into her village in August and burned down each house. They separated the men from the women and summarily executed the men. Then they raped the women. But before raping her, Rajuma said, the soldiers snatched her baby boy from her arms and threw him into a fire. The baby was screaming for her as he burned to death. We were sitting together in a hut with a translator, the three of us hunched over on little plastic stools. As Rajuma started sobbing, my forehead creased and I got angry at myself. “Why am I putting her through this? Is anybody going to want to read something so awful? I don’t even want to write this story.” I think I’m becoming the opposite of numb. Each tragedy I’ve covered, each loss I’ve absorbed, has rubbed away a little more of the insulation we all create, or were born with, that keeps the ills of the world safely away. After years of this work, I don’t have much insulation left. Now when I go off on assignment, I’m all nerves. Even before I met Rajuma, I could barely keep it together. My first day in the refugee camps, watching Rohingya men try to remain dignified as they were herded into lines to wait for a pack of glucose biscuits, made my eyes sting. I was shocked but soon learned that for decades the Rohingya have been walking around with bull’s-eyes on their foreheads. Scapegoated like the Jews in Nazi Germany, called insects like the Tutsis during Rwanda’s genocide, they are Muslim people in a Buddhist land, dehumanized by their own government and made easy prey. So I started thinking: If we don’t cover this, that’s even worse. That would be a further injustice, a further insult to the Rohingya’s humanity. It would be like telling Rajuma that the world couldn’t be bothered about what she suffered. It was very difficult to bring that interview to an end. As we parted ways, what was I supposed to say? In our culture we might say she should “see somebody.” But there were no psychotherapists around and I knew she was headed back to a plastic tarp held up by bamboo poles with nothing to do but think about those moments that I had asked her to conjure up. I wanted to give her every dollar in my wallet. Or hug her. Or punch someone in the face. This is the worst part of being a journalist: feeling helpless. Not only is there nothing you can do about the horrors in front of you, but in most cases there’s only so much you should do. We are recorders, witnesses, not aid workers. Of course, if Rajuma were bleeding in front of me and needed my help, I wouldn’t hesitate to give it. But that wasn’t the situation here; her baby was dead and she would be traumatized forever. I stood up and lamely shook her hand and said the only thing that felt close to right: “Ami dukkhito.” Of the few Bengali words I learned, those were the ones I used the most. I said them to dozens of Rohingya who lost everything. Sometimes, it’s the only thing to say. Ami dukkhito. I’m sorry. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Jane Perlez Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar with President Xi Jinping of China, in Beijing last year. She arrived for another visit on Thursday, with the two countries drawing closer despite international criticism of Myanmar.CreditPool photo by Rolex Dela Pena For the second time in a week, one of Myanmar’s top leaders is visiting Beijing, as international criticism over the brutal purge of Rohingya Muslims is bringing the neighboring countries together. Casting aside past misgivings about China’s one-party system, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto civilian leader of Myanmar and a Nobel Peace laureate, arrived on Thursday to attend a conference for international political parties hosted by China’s Communist Party. After a month of uncomfortable meetings with Western officials including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Pope Francis, and having her Freedom of Oxford award stripped for her failure to criticize the military, she is sure to find a warmer welcome in Beijing. Preceding her, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the architect of Myanmar’s scorched-earth military campaign to eject the Rohingya, met China’s president Xi Jinping last week. In a show of mutual admiration, Mr. Xi described Chinese-Myanmar military relations as the “best” ever. As Washington begins to pursue sanctions against Myanmar’s Army for what American and United Nations officials call a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim minority, China is taking advantage and filling the gap. Already spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects in Myanmar, China is now also assisting its neighbor in diplomatic efforts to try and help burnish the country’s image in the face of widespread criticism. Though China has usually been reluctant to become involved in mediation, it has offered to broker talks between Myanmar and Bangladesh, now the host of more than 600,000 Rohingya who fled the military campaign of systematic rape, massacre and arson in Myanmar. Photo Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in September. China has offered to broker talks between Myanmar and Bangladesh, which is now hosting the more than 620,000 Rohingya who have fled Myanmar since August.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times As China moves more aggressively to build a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia, Myanmar is a prime asset, a border state with a long coastline that offers a strategic outlet to the Indian Ocean. The predominantly Buddhist country has been an elusive catch for China. Anti-Chinese sentiment pervades Myanmar’s population, and there has been suspicion that China’s infrastructure projects are intended to help China more than Myanmar. With the military in the ascendancy again and Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi sidelined and frustrated with the United States’ denunciation of the Rohingya crackdown, an increasingly isolated Myanmar is accepting China’s courtship. “Myanmar values China’s understanding of the Rakhine issue, which is complicated and delicate,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said during a recent visit by the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, to Myanmar. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to use the word Rohingya and instead refers to Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya live among a Buddhist majority. She has declined to condemn the actions of the Myanmar military. At the United Nations, China blocked efforts to organize a resolution against Myanmar, and stopped language to ensure that the Rohingya have the right of return to the country. The crisis over the Rohingya gives China an opportunity to build a reputation as a peace builder, Chinese analysts say. China is already involved in brokering peace talks between warring ethnic groups in Myanmar’s northern region, which is adjacent to the Chinese border. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in Myanmar this month. A mediation plan on the refugee crisis offered by Mr. Wang does not specifically mention the plight of Rohingya Muslims. CreditHein Htet/European Pressphoto Agency “China’s broad objective is to let the world see it as the new power broker that can get things, like peace building and political settlements, done,” said Baohui Zhang, professor of international relations at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. As he starts his second term as president, Mr. Xi is intent on projecting China’s “great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics,” and an effort to help facilitate the return of the Rohingya would earn China some credit, Mr. Baohui said. A three point mediation plan offered by Mr. Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, does not specifically mention the plight of the Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom are now living in squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh just over the border from Myanmar. Understand the world with sharp insight and commentary on the major news stories of the week. Myanmar and Bangladesh have held talks about what to do about the refugees, but no Rohingya have been present. It is not clear whether Chinese envoys were present. “The plan doesn’t commit China to very much in the way of mediation,” said Mary P. Callahan, associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington. Mr. Wang’s proposal called for a cease-fire without a definition of who should stop what activities. The foreign minister asked for a strengthening of relations between Myanmar and Bangladesh, and said China would pursue economic development in Rakhine, the poorest area of Myanmar and the center of the military’s purge of the Rohingya. A pipeline funneling natural gas to China from Myanmar. One of China’s major construction companies is scheduled to start building a $7.3 billion deep-sea port next year on the coast of Myanmar’s Rakhine State.CreditImaginechina, via Associated Press China is calling for an economic corridor linking India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and China that would run through Rakhine. One of China’s major construction companies is scheduled to start building a $7.3 billion deep-sea port next year at Kyaukpyu, a port town in Rakhine on the Indian Ocean. Pipelines from the port carry gas and oil through Rakhine to southern China. The visit of General Min Aung Hlaing to Beijing in November invigorated a relationship between the Myanmar military and Beijing that had been languishing, said U Maung Aung Myoe, professor of international affairs at the International University of Japan and an expert on the Myanmar military. As the possibility of any military ties with the United States disappears, the general can now look more easily to the People’s Liberation Army of China for support, Mr. Maung Aung Myoe said. The United States maintained sanctions against the military junta that ruled Myanmar for decades. But the Obama administration relaxed many of those penalties the year after Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2015 elections. There were even plans to invite some Myanmar military officers to the United States for training as a way to counter China’s longstanding ties with the army. Since the expulsion of the Rohingya, Washington has stopped contacts with the military, and Congress is considering new sanctions. China had been a major provider of military equipment to Myanmar, but those ties frayed after Beijing sold inferior fighter jets to the air force in the late 1990s, Mr. Maung Aung Myoe said. Since 2001, Myanmar has been buying more from Russia and Israel, he said. Now, China might return as a provider of military equipment. Both armies, he said, were sympathetic to each other’s problems with Muslim minorities. The Chinese military faced what it considered a Muslim insurgency in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, and now the Myanmar Army has expelled the Rohingya. “China wants to help Myanmar by lessening the international pressure on it,” he said. For that, he said, Myanmar’s military was no doubt appreciative. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Jane Merrick It is one of the most popular children’s books of 2017, a collection of stories about female role models from Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie to Hillary Clinton and Serena Williams, inspiring girls to aim high and challenge the status quo. But Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, likely to be in many Christmas stockings, has run into controversy because of one of the 100 women included in its pages. When the book was written last year, Aung San Suu Kyi was deemed a worthy subject: winner of the Nobel peace prize and epitome of courage in the face of oppression. But her fall from grace over her response to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, described by the UN as possible genocide, has triggered calls for her to be taken out of future editions. In response, the authors, Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, are considering removing her from reprints. Angry parents insist Suu Kyi is not suitable for the book. The book, aimed at children aged six and over, devotes two pages to each of its role models, including commissioned illustrations by female artists. It quotes Aung San Suu Kyi as saying: “Since we live in this world, we have to do our best for this world.” It charts her story from her protests against the junta through 21 years of house arrest to her release and leadership: “She won the Nobel peace prize, and inspired millions of people in her own country and across the world, all without leaving her house.” On the book’s Facebook page, Lenka Uzakova wrote: “As much as 99 per cent of book is inspiring, I found it absolutely disgusting that you have included someone suspected of genocide in the book. Aung San Suu Kyi has no place between those women. Someone who does nothing and perhaps is directly involved in massacres, rapes, burning of kids alive … I am speechless she is in the book.” Another parent, Gerri Peev, said: “I bought this book for my three-year-old daughter as an antidote to the tyranny of ‘pink princess publishing’. It is filled with inspiring female role models who don’t rely on a prince to sort their lives out. I was dismayed to see this page effectively canonising Aung San Suu Kyi. I hope the publishers issue another edition, updating her fall from grace over the Rohingya massacre.” Labour MP and shadow justice minister Yasmin Qureshi, who has raised concerns in parliament about the Rohingya crisis, said: “I often wonder how it can be possible to go from being one of the most admired and respected civil rights champions, a symbol of courage, patience and principle, to someone who shows such lack of compassion. “I have no doubt that history will remember her as the leader who watched on while mass killing, systematic rape and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands who were forced to live in squalid refugee camps. I’d encourage the authors to consider that there is an entire generation of young Rohingya children who are stateless and hopeless, suffering a miserable existence. Aung San Suu Kyi’s refusal to condemn makes her complicit.” In a statement the authors said: “We’re monitoring the situation closely and we don’t exclude the idea of removing her from future reprints.” Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls was first published in the US and is described as the “most-funded original book in the history of crowdfunding”. It is published in the UK by Particular Books, part of Penguin Random House. Last week Blackwell’s named it as its book of the year, beating among others Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has won more than 120 international honours, including the Nobel prize, was last week stripped of her Freedom of the City of Dublin award and earlier lost her Freedom of Oxford accolade. The Dublin decision came after musician and activist Bob Geldof returned his own Freedom of the City in protest. St Hugh’s College Oxford, where Aung San Suu Kyi studied, has taken down her portrait. It is estimated that 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh since the crackdown by Myanmar’s security forces began. Last week the aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières reported that at least 6,700 Rohingya, including hundreds of children, were killed in the first month of the crackdown. Criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi’s response intensified last week when it emerged that two Reuters journalists have been detained and face 14 years in jail for reporting on the crisis. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/24/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls-aung-san-suu-kyi (c) 2017 The Guardian

Katori Hall’s play Our Lady of Kibeho is the story of three friends who insisted that they were visited by the Virgin Mary and told of the horror that lay ahead By James Dacre The 16-year-old schoolgirl Alphonsine Mumureke said she was in the cafeteria of the Catholic boarding school Kibeho College, Rwanda, when she heard a voice “soft as air and sweeter than music”. She saw a beautiful woman – neither white nor black – floating above the floor in a flowing seamless dress, with a veil that covered her hair. She wore no shoes, just like Alphonsine and her classmates. “Who are you?” Alphonsine asked. “I am the mother of the word,” replied the woman, whom Alphonsine immediately recognised as the Virgin Mary. Then she issued a terrible warning: Rwanda was going to become a hell on Earth in a conflict that would see the picturesque rivers of Kibeho village run red with blood. It was 28 November 1981, and when Alphonsine reported what she had seen, her friends ridiculed her, her teachers scolded her and her village shunned her. But then another two students, Anathalie and Marie Claire – the three became known as “the Trinity” – insisted they too had been visited by the Virgin Mary and given the same apocalyptic warning. Kibeho is a small parish nestled in Mubuga, the “land of the seven hills” in eastern Rwanda. It is the most famine-prone region of one of the world’s poorest countries, but so beautiful that locals say: “God comes on holiday here.” Of course we now know that, a decade after the Trinity’s terrible visions, Rwanda was riven by a terrible genocide. During 100 days in 1994, up to a million of Rwanda’s population of just over seven million were murdered by the ruling Hutu government in an attempt to exterminate the Tutsi tribe. Thousands of people were slaughtered in their churches, their decapitated bodies dumped into rivers. Colleagues, neighbours, friends and even family members slaughtered one another. Kibeho itself suffered two massacres. Thousands of citizens were brutally killed in the parish church and, a year later, on the esplanade where the apparitions had taken place. Most of the college’s students were murdered. In 2001, after a 20-year investigation by the Vatican – and seven years after the genocide – the pope certified the apparitions as authentic. Tens of thousands of pilgrims now travel to Kibeho each year in search of benediction. The extraordinary story of these three schoolgirls inspired my friend, the American playwright Katori Hall, to write Our Lady of Kibeho. I first worked with Katori in New York in 2006. Katori’s background as a journalist and an actor bring a rare sensibility to her plays, which combine a reporter’s eye for a good story and historical detail together with an understanding of how to craft characters that only an actor can experience. Back in London, I staged the world premiere of her play The Mountaintop, about the life and death of Martin Luther King, which went on to become the surprise winner of the best play award at the 2010 Oliviers and is now one of the most produced new plays in the US. Gabrielle Brooks, Yasmin Mwanza and Pepter Lunkuse in rehearsals for Our Lady of Kibeho. Photograph: Idil Sukan For Katori, Kibeho College symbolised the defining role the Catholic church has played in Rwanda’s education system and political life over the last century, including shaping its ideological divisions. It was the church that had helped implement the disastrous “racial” nationwide census, distinguishing Hutu from Tutsi in every neighbourhood. Alone in their community, Alphonsine, Anathalie and Marie Claire understood the lessons that scripture offered against the growing hatred of their times. Young and powerless, their warnings went unheeded. Survivors of the tragedy describe burning churches, streets clotted with corpses, starving livestock, mass graves, lost orphans and famine and disease everywhere – the very things described by the three girls when recounting their terrible visions. Fergal Keane, a BBC correspondent in Rwanda in 1994, found it difficult to capture the horror of what happened. “In writing about Rwanda, I am conscious that my words will always be unequal to the task … What I encountered was evil in a form that rendered me inarticulate.” Most historical accounts of the genocide focus on either society or the state, the former exploring the longstanding racism in Rwandan society and the latter documenting the complex power struggles in government and the ways in which propaganda radiated from the capital to the provinces and inspired the violence. While Katori’s play touches on the political, economic and social, it is more interested in how religion can influence the personal and political behaviour of a nation. What makes Katori’s play so moving is that it takes place at a time before the genocide, when there is still space for optimism in the lives of the schoolchildren it depicts. Some of those children who survived have helped Katori in researching her play. They have noted that the power of Our Lady of Kibeho lies in its ability to stay true to the perspectives of Alphonsine, Anathalie and Marie Claire. Despite rumblings of the growing divide between Hutus and Tutsis, we lose ourselves in this story of these three young women who want to change the world they will inherit. Whether the visions that they described were real or not, the schoolgirls’ testimony highlighted the daily injustices that they saw around them. Theirs was a protest against the moral, social and political decay of their community – a reminder that sometimes young people can sense tragedy ahead in a way that adults are incapable of. In turbulent times when the voices of young people are so often ignored, Katori and I hope that the UK premiere of this extraordinary play will spark a conversation on ways to heal our own political, racial and religious divides. On a summer morning in 2003, many of those who had participated in the genocidal killings walked out of prison into the sunshine, singing hymns, their freedom granted by the president. Survivors watched as those who had killed their families and friends returned to their villages, reoccupying homes that had been empty for almost a decade. Today, Rwandans continue to confront on a daily basis the pain of memory, the power of reconciliation, the challenges of redemption and forgiveness and the ineradicability of loss. Two words hover over the nation’s collective psychology: never again. • Our Lady of Kibeho is at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton, until 2 February.

By Irene Soteriou A displaced Yazidi man carries his daughter as they cross the Iraqi-Syrian border. (Credit: Ahmad al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images) The Yazidi people are a Kurdish-speaking minority in northern Iraq and Syria. Throughout their history, Yazidis claim to have experienced 73 genocides . During Saddam Hussein’s Anfal genocide of the 1980’s, Yazidis, Kurds, and Assyrians were subjected to forced “ Arabization ,” deportation, destruction of settlements and cultural heritage, chemical warfare, and genocide. They were also victims of gendercide due to mass executions of their male populations. The Anfal genocide resulted in the deaths of 180,000 people and the destruction of ninety percent of Kurdish villages. Genocide of Yazidis by the Islamic State (ISIS or Da’esh) occurred in 2014 in Sinjar, northern Iraq. ISIS branded Yazidis heretics, infidels, and “devil-worshippers,” because of parallels between Quranic descriptions of the devil and the Yazidis’ reverence for the peacock angel, Tawusî Melek. UN investigators estimate that since 2014, over 5,000 Yazidi civilians have been massacred , 7,000 have been kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery , and more than 500,000 now live as refugees . Entire male populations of individual villages were rounded up and executed. Mass graves continue to be exhumed. Forced abortions and rapes were used as weapons of war. ISIS even published a pamphlet for ISIS fighters that justified the rape of Yazidi girls as young as 12. Six years after the 2014 ISIS genocide, 3,000 abducted Yazidi women and girls remain missing. Many continue to live as slaves. Though Yazidi leaders have declared that women and girls rescued from slavery will be respected, Yazidis do not accept children born from ISIS rapes, a policy that forces women to choose between returning home and keeping their children. Suicide rates among women formerly held in captivity are high. Anti-suicide programs have not been supported by local and international donors. According to the UN, of the 100,000 Yazidis who have returned to Sinjar since 2015, nearly all lack access to critical services such as healthcare, education, and psychological support. Family units have been severely damaged, because many Yazidi men were executed during the genocide. Forced by ISIS to convert and change their names and language , many rescued children have forgotten their Yazidi identities , slowing reintegration. This situation is the result of violation of Article 2e of the Genocide Convention: “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” It is a continuation of the ISIS genocide against the Yazidis. Genocide Watch recognizes the Islamic State’s intentional destruction of the Yazidi ethnic and religious group as Genocide. In Genocide Watch’s Ten Stages of Genocide, it is Stage 9: Extermination. Though many countries, including the United States, have declared that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis, international failure to support secure Yazidi resettlement constitutes a form of Stage 10: Denial . Genocide Watch recommends: · Investment by the US, EU, and UN in resettlement, development, and psychological support for Yazidi refugees and survivors. · Adoption of a more active NGO role in resolution of Sinjar’s local governance issues. · Recruitment and training of Yazidis into Iraq’s official security forces and greater representation of Yazidis in Iraq’s government. · Prosecution of Islamic State combatants in a Special Tribunal for Iraq and Syria for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.